What's Goin' On

Watching "And Still I Rise" on PBS, thinking about "how far we've come".

Looking at how we've all lost a lot of ground in general the last 20 years, but knowing if I've lost a lot, then there's a shitload of black folks who're losing everything.

Some are being pushed into depressed neighborhoods with fewer jobs and shittier schools, and stuck in the whirlpool of ignorance poverty and crime that sucks an awful of the people into what's become a Coin-Operated Prison System.

And it occurs to me - intentionally or not, we're in the process of enslaving black people for the 3rd time.

Gotta be something better.

It's The Mendacity, Stoopid

Chez Pazienza at Daily Banter:

It's difficult to express both the audacity and the insidiousness of what Conway's doing here (what she's been doing for months, really). Her comment about the nonexistent Bowling Green Massacre is a masterwork of calculated mendacity, the kind of thing that would be admirable if it weren't so dangerous. You can't help but wonder if Conway didn't do the Italian chef finger kiss to herself after she came up with it. Go back and read it one more time. She creates a phony event that she uses specifically to assault the media for its unwillingness to cover, knowing full well that four things will quickly happen: 1) The fake event will immediately become "real" for Trump's people, lodging in their collective consciousness, especially as the lie is repeated again and again as it becomes its own story; 2) they'll assume the reason they had never heard of it was precisely because of a full-on conspiracy by the dishonest media, making it a self-reinforcing delusion; 3) Trump loyalists and media shills will begin reverse-engineering facts to fit the lie, giving it "credibility," or at the very least providing her enough plausible deniability to feign outrage; 4) she'll get double the bang for her buck because once journalists begin calling her out on the lie, she can again slam them for not accepting her apology or asking her to clarify her comment.

It's genius. Evil genius. Which is exactly why it needs to be fought against tooth and nail.

Here's why: not simply because Kellyanne Conway's lie wasn't an accident but because it was a strategy. The goal of Conway is to deliberately muddy the waters between fact and fiction so that the two are indistinguishable. The reason for this? Because doing so debases the truth to the point where it simply doesn't matter anymore. This is important because the truth -- cold, hard fact -- is the Trump administration's worst enemy, as it is the enemy of authoritarian governments in general but of Trump specifically because he lives his life complete unmoored to it. What's more, the truth is what a free press derives its power and authority from, and the Trump administration has already declared the press "the opposition." What better way to destroy that opposition, then, than to take away the importance of that for which it stands.

Bob and Chez podcast - twice a week, the episodes are usually up late-ish in the evening every Tuesday and Thursday.

Robert Reich

Resistance Report 02-03-17

Tax returns, conflicts of interest and the blind trust
Russia
Cronyism and Ultra-Nationalists
Attacks on democratic institutions
Steve Bannon

Black History Month 5 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Slavery a Southern Phenomenon

Slavery in the United States is often thought of as a “Southern problem.” Indeed, many students, and even teachers, are unaware of the role the North played in the history of American slavery or the extent of slavery in New England because it is often ignored in textbooks, according to Sarah Kreckel, a curriculum writer at Brown University. Long thought of as the birthplace of abolitionism, New England has a more complex history of slavery and the trade in enslaved people than many realize. Colonial North American ships began to participate in the slave trade as early as the 1640s. Almost all of colonial America’s slave ships originated in New England. As pointed out by Herb Reich in the book Lies They Teach in School: Exposing the Myths Behind 250 Commonly Believed Fallacies, the first colony to legalize slavery was Massachusetts in 1641, where slaves worked in the vast tobacco fields.

Today's Alt-Fact Barbie

Back To The Gilded Age

A little reminder of the damage a bad president can do.

Vox:

Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a lot of discussion in medical circles about bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to drug innovation in America.

This idea is embodied in Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, who has reportedly been helping the president vet a pool of candidates to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast.

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves.

Trump to remove USDA animal welfare protections from cruelty for dogs. A reminder from 9/16: he's never HAD a dog pic.twitter.com/NykVqnG6Nj

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 4, 2017

So, like, one of the things Da Gubmint is there trying to do for you is to keep some asshole from killing your dog.  If you can't quite work yourself up to giving a fuck about people, maybe you could think about finding a little compassion for their fucking house pets.

More from the Vox piece:

One of the key notions that undergirds the Peter Thiel view of the FDA is that if the agency just got rid of some of the pesky restrictions for drug approval, we’d usher in another golden age in drug development. (Thiel declined our interview request.)

To test this idea, I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

Let's just try to remember one or two itty-bitty things, OK?

You were supposed to have read that shit way back in high school, y'know.

Learn a little more about FDA

Today's Pix

Today's Tweet

me pic.twitter.com/tq34ExV6sN

— Trump Draws (@DonaldDraws) February 1, 2017

Black History Month 4 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Praise for the KKK

In the third edition of the textbook United States History for Christian Schools, published by Bob Jones University Press in 2001, it says “The Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.” Considering the reign of terror the KKK inflicted on Black people in the South for nearly a century after Reconstruction, including thousands of acts of racial terrorism in the form of lynchings, this statement is so incredible it qualifies as ludicrous.

Birthday

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps, including Bayard Rustin in 1942,[2] Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1952, and the members of the ultimately successful Browder v. Gayle 1956 lawsuit (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) who were arrested in Montgomery for not giving up their bus seats months before Parks. NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded.[3][4]

Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement.

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards. Her situation also opened doors.

BTW - this is how you win:

This is not:

Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2016

Todays GIF

Sorry, ladies. It takes a while to train some of us. But we'll get it eventually.

pic.twitter.com/tr8epXgBmW

— Theater of SciFi (@theaterofscifi) February 3, 2017

 

Alt-Fact Barbie Rides Again

...asking the obvious question: "Are you stupid enough to swallow whatever I pull outa my ass today?"

And wouldn't it be nice if a producer at MSNBC would at least try to get Chris Matthews to stay awake long enough to hear these ridiculous "answers"?

Alex Wagner seems to be adapting, but there are way too many Press Poodles who are stuck in Old-Think Mode, trying to apply a set of analytical tools based on "Politics As Usual".

Here's the thing, kids:

Silence Implies Consent

But more than that - by keeping quiet about it, there's a fair probability that Trump is sending us a little signal: the same could happen to any of you if you don't shut up.

Play nice and make Daddy happy or you'll force Daddy to punish you.

WaPo:

ONE DAY after President Trump and Vladi­mir Putin held their first phone call, Russian-backed forces mounted their largest offensive in months in eastern Ukraine. Now, days later, one of Russia’s most prominent opposition activists is in a coma in a Moscow hospital, where he was rushed after suddenly taking ill on Thursday morning. Vladi­mir Kara-Murza, a writer and civil- society activist with many supporters in Washington, is believed by his family to be the victim of a poisoning attack — the second they believe he has suffered since 2015.

His agony most likely holds a message from Mr. Putin to the new Trump administration. Since 2014, the Kremlin has endured sanctions from the United States and the European Union for its aggression in Ukraine and for human rights violations, such as the killings of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. With the new assault on Ukraine and the felling of Mr. Kara-Murza, the Kremlin hopes to establish that such crimes will be tolerated by the new U.S. president as part of a refounded relationship with Moscow.

So far, Mr. Putin’s gambit is succeeding: Mr. Trump, while sparring with close U.S. ally Australia, has had nothing to say about the events in Ukraine and Moscow.

 

Today's Tweet

That Would Be Awesome. pic.twitter.com/hM1jHCxum8

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) February 3, 2017

A Question

Are we creating terrorists faster than we're killing them?

The key question after a mission like last week in Yemen: Are we creating terrorists faster than we're killing them? https://t.co/PcndhFLC7f

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 3, 2017

Here's another question: What kinda fucked up world we got here when that's a valid Policy Question?

You kill your way into problems, not out of them.